By Glenn Drexhage

The meeting began in a downtown Vancouver boardroom, moved on to dinner at a Gastown restaurant and lingered over glasses of wine and a typical late-evening conversation topic: what keeps you up at night?

On this occasion, the question was debated by Alan Winter, president and CEO of the New Media Innovation Centre (NewMIC) and his dinner companions—directors of advanced research from tech heavyweights IBM, Nortel Networks and Electronic Arts. It turns out they all had the same concern: no one could predict the future direction of e-business, and that was a problem.

That meeting occurred 18 months ago and its impact still resonates. “For me, it was a defining moment,” Winter said. “You could just see people’s eyes lighting up [at the possibilities].”

The inspiration from that meeting led to the October opening of a 25,000-square-foot research facility in Vancouver with lofty ambitions: to rival the highly-acclaimed Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab.

The centre will focus on the research, development and commercialization of new media technology —tools for digital, interactive media. In doing so, NewMIC aims to be a 21st-century water cooler of sorts: a site for collaboration between experts from industry, academia and government, where the skills of engineers, scientists and artists can meld.

Business with an E
E-business is core to NewMIC projects. The centre is built around research clusters, which are sponsored by sustaining
members (see sidebar). This approach gathers experts from various fields to collaborate on sector-specific applications.

Its e-business cluster is sponsored by IBM, and other clusters include online games, network performance and wireless broadband streaming. Brent Henderson, a services executive at the Centre for IBM e-business Innovation in Vancouver, hopes his company’s involvement with NewMIC will solve one of the biggest problems afflicting e-business applications: usability.

“Frankly, usability is something that does keep a lot of people in the industry awake at night,” he said. “Despite everyone’s good intentions, most Web sites today deliver a bad or sub-optimal user experience.”

Indeed, usability—which techies refer to as “humancomputer interaction” (HCI)—is likely to dominate e-biz discussions and applications well into the future. “I think [usability] is really key,” said Dr. Peggy Storey, an adjunct scientist at NewMIC. She also is an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Victoria, and is visiting MIT until next summer. “Often it’s overlooked and I think that’s actually starting to change. It’s important if you’re building an [e-business] application that you also have a model of the user in mind. And then how do you put those two together?”

In other words, the technology shouldn’t obscure the experience. “[E-business] is just business with an E in front of it,” Henderson said. “And customers should care more about the business than about the E.”

Tech toolkits
The e-business cluster at NewMIC is running a couple of projects designed to tackle usability. One of these—which
involves IBM, Storey and some of her students—focuses on using visualization technology to provide a “toolkit” to help users handle the reams of information found on the Web.This would be accessible from a Web browser.

For example, when Storey searched for flights from Boston, Mass., to the West Coast to attend NewMIC’s opening, she got a huge list of results. She would like to develop an application that would help users visually refine and enhance such searches, using criteria such as flight length, stopovers, air miles, cost, or departures and arrivals.

“Imagine if you could present that information in an interactive way, so that it isn’t just text,” Storey said. One possibility might be a graph representing flight schedules with different lines indicating departures and arrivals, discontinuities in the lines highlighting stopovers and colour codes ranking important factors such as cost or choice of airline. “It’s putting the design into the hands of the user. Instead of being a passive consumer, it’s allowing them to really exploit the media.”

This idea is also being used for an experimental interface called “Map Explorer,” which includes features such as sliders that restrict the value of certain attributes. This allows the user to refine a search in a more immediate way using digital-map technology. The project is still in its early stages but was showcased at NewMIC’s opening. A basic demo featured a map of Vancouver on a computer monitor. Notations and comments can be added and saved to a profile of favourite locations, and can also be shared with other users via e-mail. The city map could be replaced with other information, such as airline seating arrangements or a building layout.

It’s a product that could present real opportunities for the travel and tourism industry, and the research team planned to
have a prototype completed by the end of 2001.

Another initiative is the “Person Identification Project” involving Dr. David Poole, a NewMIC adjunct scientist and a
professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia, plus students and IBM personnel. The project
explores ways of extending the person identification module (PIM) for the Health Data Network, which is software that IBM has deployed in some hospitals in Toronto and the U.S. This software normalizes medical data from disparate sources, allowing for a consistent view for health professionals.

The PIM works to ensure patients are accurately identified through attributes such as name, address and hair colour.

And it estimates the likelihood that an identification is wrong, providing a measurable level of certainty in crucial situations. “It’s for something where being right is extremely important,” said Alex MacAulay, an IBM advisory analyst.

The system can also be “tuned” according to specific situations. For example, a health care population in China will need
to be treated differently, simply because many people have the same last names.

Other public-sector areas, such as social services and justice, could also use this application. And business could
benefit as well, especially in areas such as customer relationship management.

Clustering ideas
In keeping with NewMIC’s open approach to problem solving, such developments aren’t taking place solely within the ebusiness cluster. Research from other groups also informs the e-biz efforts. The network performance cluster, sponsored by Nortel, is dedicated to guaranteeing multimedia quality-of service levels. This would mean, for example, that a business delivering rented movies over the Internet could ensure the film actually plays to the end and the customer receives the full value of the transaction—something that isn’t possible today.

The wireless broadband Internet cluster, sponsored by Sierra Wireless, is working on increasing wireless usage and
examining multimedia devices. Meanwhile, the e-lifestyles cluster, sponsored by Telus, analyzes trends for new products
and services that can be offered via the ’net.

Quarterly meetings allow cluster participants to share insights and inquiries, and the focus is on collaboration. “NewMIC is really a place where we can flow ideas,” said CEO Winter. “To some extent, the process of coming up with projects and talking about them is as important as the results themselves.”

Salivating at the prospects
In addition to the involvement of tech giants such as IBM and Nortel, smaller businesses, known as industry affiliates, are
also contributing. One of those is HyperWallet, a two-year-old Vancouver company that enables ’net-based cash transfers for online shopping.

HyperWallet isn’t directly involved in a cluster, but Lisa Shields, company co-founder and chief technology officer, is auditing NewMIC projects. She’s also the director of the Wireless Innovation Network of B.C., which aims to give early-stage wireless firms access to NewMIC facilities and equipment.

“[These firms] will be fed and watered by all the wonderful entrepreneurs coming in,” Shields said. Plus, access to the heavyweight sustaining members “makes companies like ours salivate.”

These are very early days for NewMIC, and more projects and research lie ahead. Labs for human-computer interaction, network performance and video/audio are in the works and will join NewMIC’s completed $2 million virtual-reality facility.

But industry specifics remain scarce. “It’s such a white space,” said IBM’s Henderson. “All you can say for sure is that
e-business is going to continue to grow at an incredible rate.”

Web newmedia
Electronic Arts http://www.ea.com
HyperWallet http://www.hyperwallet.com
IBM http://www.ibm.com
NewMIC http://www.newmic.com
Nortel Networks http://www.nortelnetworks.com
Sierra Wireless http://www.sierrawireless.com
Sony http://www.sony.com
Telus http://www.telus.com
Wireless Innovation Network of B.C. http://www.winbc.org
Xerox http://www.xerox.com